29 Quotes by Winifred Gallagher

Your living room should say sociable and personal.

In learning about that, I realized I had subconsciously re-created my mother's living room.

I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.

All day long, you are selectively paying attention to something, and much more often than you may suspect, you can take charge of this process to good effect. Indeed, your ability to focus on this and suppress that is the key to controlling your experience and, ultimately, your well-being.

Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim’s stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy.

People who are diagnosed as having “generalized anxiety disorder” are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.

Whenever you squander attention on something that doesn’t put your brain through its paces and stimulate change, your mind stagnates a little and life feels dull.

Once out of your cradle, you don’t focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness.

Yet he argued that even a tedious topic can take on a certain fascination if you make an effort to look at it afresh: “The subject must be made to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away.